


The Weregeld

by Auntarctica, Greekhoop



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Consort Loki, Dysfunctional Family, Incest, Loki Flouncing, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-11-16 13:29:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auntarctica/pseuds/Auntarctica, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greekhoop/pseuds/Greekhoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unsettling family secrets come to light when Loki accepts Thor's terms in exchange for an early parole. Very much movieverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He heard the approaching footsteps while they were still far above him. In the chill and cavernous darkness of the subterranean vault, sound carried a long way. The spiral staircase that led down into this chamber below ground had 2697 steps. He was certain of the number; he had counted each one on the descent, filed the sum carefully away in his mind, keeping it close at hand in case he needed to produce it later.

He tried to count again, but his once-sharp senses were muddied and disoriented by too long with nothing to stimulate them but darkness and silence.

Presently, black galleons resolved out of the darkness. Natural stone pillars, stalactites, the divoted walls of the cave. They were bringing a light, he thought. Like the sound of footsteps, it reached him from a long way off. 

Now they were getting somewhere. The fire rune was inscribed on his left wrist. If he could reach it, set it to work, then he could take control of the torches. And then, he thought. And then he would figure something out. He had always done well under pressure, and he had rarely been under more pressure than he was now.

Carefully, ever so carefully, he began to work against his bonds. The thick chains that spiraled around his limbs reacted at once, tightening. Old bruises began to throb again, but he ignored them. He slid his left hand along the polished surface of the stone, feeling the coldness of the rock against his skin. One inch, two, keeping his movements slow and even. The bonds did not put up any resistance. He had been practicing this, working with them rather than against. It had paid off. He moved his arm another fraction of an inch, turning it so that the fire rune was outside. He flexed the numb fingers of his right hand, stretching them blindly towards the rune. Close now, so close that he could feel with his fingertips the livid heat crackling on the skin of his wrist. 

The chains constricted around his arms. He knew what was coming a moment before it happened, and he tried to jerk his right hand, clamp it down over the rune. All too late, though. The bonds wrenched his arms back, crushing them against the stone. He fought then, knowing that these chains had been made to bind stronger creatures than him, that he could not break them, but fighting anyway because surrender was unthinkable. It would take more than this to instill obedience in him.

He tired out quickly, and as soon as he fell still, the bonds loosened. He slumped, exhausted, against them, and listened to the footsteps coming down the stairs.

They were close now, almost upon him. The walls of the cavern flickered with diffuse flame. He lowered his head. He wouldn’t look, he had decided. He would not look or speak, and then his brother would know exactly where they stood.

Thor came down in to the vaulted cavern. He tipped the torch into a brazier and a fire sprang to life. It was a small, weak flame, but enough to hurt Loki’s eyes. He blinked against the bright orbs of fool’s-fire that whirled before him.

“You’ve seen better days,” his brother said. There was something in the words, something like sympathy, like genuine regret. Loki would have preferred cruelty.

He glanced up, one quick look from beneath his lashes, plenty of time to imprint the outline his brother’s brutish form indelibly upon his eye.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Thor said. “I haven’t come to squabble.”

“Then you’ve come to gloat,” bit out Loki, unwilling to look any more upon his brother’s unrelenting radiance, which lit even this dark place from corner to crevice, suffusing it with the lambent glow of his presence. 

But Thor never gloated, and Loki knew this.

Even as he said it, he knew it was another of his lies, told to suit his own desire to believe it. It was convenient, indeed, to be able to manufacture one’s own reality from wholecloth, as easily as he had forged Fenrir, the most terrible wolf, and Sleipnir, the best of all horses.

Even now he felt a private, self-satisfied sting of pride at the thought of them, and he allowed himself a small smile.

“I have not come to gloat over you.” Thor’s voice was low, like the edge of a whetstone. “You know that is not my nature, brother. Curious that one who speaks of another’s gloating would wear such smugness on his own countenance.”

Yes, Loki knew all about Thor’s nature. His glorious warrior’s nobility and staggering lack of weakness, his utter inability to fail. It was the bane of Loki’s own, the thing that rendered him lesser, lower, coarser, darker. Lauded, but never as loudly. Loved, but never enough. If he were honest, Loki could not even begin to fathom what enough might be. But he was not honest.

That was his nature.

Loki’s miniscule smile warped into a scowl. He fell into sullen silence, his gaze averted.

Neither Thor nor his glory had receded in the interim. The soft metallic rustle of his armor came to Loki’s ears despite his abstention from sight; with the slightest shift of Thor’s stance the gleaming silver scales slid and rearranged themselves like water. 

“You call me brother,” Loki sneered abruptly, glaring at the ground.

“You say that as if it were accusation.”

“It is.”

“You are my brother,” said Thor, without hesitation. “Whether you would have it so or not.”

“Despite and still?” Loki demanded, unable to resist the urge to raise his head now, and inflict himself once again with the numerous poisoned arrows of his brother’s perfection.

Thor looked at him, lips parted, eyes narrowed with guarded intensity.

“Despite,” he said deliberately. “And still.”

Loki laughed bitterly.

“You lie,” he said, with venom, “and you lie badly, son of Odin. You have no talent for it.”

Thor came forward a step, his armor flashing as he raised one powerful arm. At first, Loki thought that he meant to strike him. He’d certainly done plenty of that, though never without provocation, never not in self-defense. And Loki thought that if his brother would only hit him now, just once, with vengeance in his heart, then he could finally get around to hating him properly. The way he had always wanted to hate him.

But Thor did not hit him. He laid the backs of his knuckles against Loki’s cheek, stroking it with a tenderness that was not entirely unaccustomed. Only then did Loki flinch from him. Of course, a man like his brother would have had the luxury of learning gentleness. 

“Listen to me, brother,” Thor said. “And listen well. I have no wish to fight you.”

“Then what is your wish?” Loki said harshly. He felt his voice growing tight, felt it trying to get away from him, and he fought it back under control. “Have out with it, so that I might be rid of you all the sooner.”

“I wish to gift you with half of my kingdom.”

Loki jerked his head up sharply. Too sharply, for he had not properly prepared himself to behold his brother’s radiance up close. It burned his eyes, which had been so long accustomed to darkness, and Loki felt the words threatening to dry up in his throat.

“Get out,” he whispered.

“Hear my proposition, brother…”

“I will hear nothing from you! I will accept no gifts from you! I would rather an eternity of this darkness than another moment of your light.”

“You’ll change your mind in time,” Thor said patiently.

“I will hate you forever. Until Ragnarok. When the battle is upon us, my only wish will be to live long enough to see you perish.”

“That’s enough, Loki,” Thor said. “That’s more than enough. You don’t have to say such things to impress me.”

Loki lunged at his throat, forgetting about the bonds entirely. They tightened around his limbs, throwing him back against the stone. He cried out, a harsh inelegant sound of misery mixed with rage. Thor’s golden brow furled with concern. It was inevitable, Loki thought. His brother would always be there to see him at his worst.

“Keep still,” Thor said. “I will release you. Then we can talk as kinsmen.”

Loki looked away, but he made no protest as Thor unclasped the chains. Once released, Loki stumbled. His limbs were numb, his legs slow to hold his weight. Thor did not try to touch him, and Loki gripped the edges of the stone to keep himself on his feet.

He glared up at his brother.

“You know that you have nowhere to go,” Thor said. “Now, will you be civil?”

Loki smoldered, glass-green eyes lit with lust and loathing. It was impossible for anyone to look upon Thor for any sustained interlude without becoming enmeshed by his comeliness; Loki was no exception, much as he hated the fact of it, and himself, barring the fact.

“I am ever civil,” Loki said, through taut and reluctant lips. “It is you who are the bombastic and brutal, you who speak best with your hammer.”

Thor’s classical visage cracked a smile, almost imperceptible.

“If you say it, brother, then it must be as you say. As ever.”

Loki’s eyes widened and he sat forward in his incredulity, in spite of himself.

“Do you mock me, Thor? Impugning my credibility?”

“Perhaps. But that is of no consequence to our conversation. Shelve your tantrums for the present. You can upbraid me later - you will have your chance for that. Until Ragnarok, even.”

Loki glared, but was silent.

Thor gazed at him for a moment, frowning.

“Your hair is lank, where it once was lustrous, and your pallor is white as cod, where once it was flush as buttermilk. This cavern does not agree with you, son of Odin. I suggest you leave it – and I am your only conduit toward that end, brother. It would behoove you to put aside your pride and cleave unto me.”

Try as he might to sulk and remain silent, at this Loki could not.

“I have cleaved with you, is that not enough? Cloven from you many times, in fact. I do not call you brother. And yet you do not cease, and you are not dissuaded.”

Thor’s face, normally expressive, remained still as tundra.

“Then you should be able to glean much from that, brother Loki, for you are my brother – it is written in the scrolls of Asgard, and thus it is so. No revelation supersedes it, no word or lack of words from a trickster’s mouth will contradict it, and it will not be unmade, even by gods, for we are they.” 

He leveled his gaze at Loki’s, and Loki felt like he had been embraced by summer, all at once, as if sunlight had penetrated his prison and he found himself in a green field at the end of a bitter winter. And he hated that feeling, the way he succumbed to it, his face upturned and lips parted, his eyes wanting to close and bask, bask in all that was Thor.

“I loathe you,” he whispered.

Thor’s gaze flickered, a brief knitting of something crossing his smooth, bossed brow like a minor eclipse. Something like injury. But then it was gone, and Loki was left with the full onslaught of Thor’s brilliance once again.

“It is of no matter. You will come with me, on my terms, or here you will wilt until Ragnarok.” His tone held a finality that Loki knew all too well – unvarnished, absolute and brooking no more nonsense. A hammer strike was often next, when Thor spoke in this way. “I offer you half my kingdom, the thing you desire above all – above even the love of a devoted brother – and you insist you would rather pine and languish at the bottom of a pit.”

Thor leaned in, the ends of his flaxen hair swinging forward, and there was an odd menace in their gentle motion. Loki almost recoiled, but pride proved stronger than alarm. He held fast, fingers digging into rock, unwilling to cower before Thor, nor blanch an inch from his approach.

“…I shall tell you, Loki, that the worst of it shall be what you cannot even conceive of yet: the disintegration of your mind. All your wit, all your cleverness and tricks dissembling into a miasma of confusion and sensory deprivation. That is the real torture of this place, of what Odin has done to you, though you do not see it yet.”

Loki shuddered, staring in outrage, stricken by Thor’s proximity, by the terrible intimacy of his words.

“My mind is fine,” he hissed, through unresponsive lips that betrayed him. “My mind is intact and sharp as Fenrir’s tooth, and if you are fool enough to loose me from this place I will find a way to steal all of your kingdom, you may mark it.”

“Half,” said Thor, calmly, “and in name only. It will be an honorary title, but you shall receive all the same glories and plaudits as if you were King. They shall bow down to you and give you all manner of deference, for that is what you truly desire, if we are speaking candidly. You’ve no love or aptitude for ruling, only for the trappings of the throne - attention, exaltation, and having men kneel before you.”

“How dare you,” began Loki, but it sounded piteous to his own ears and he broke off, appalled. His once melodious voice had coarsened and atrophied from disuse. For some time after his imprisonment he had railed and clamored and rattled his bonds, yelling at the surface, sure that Odin was listening, that they all listened, for surely no one could ignore Loki Laufeyson. But as the days passed and nothing returned to him but blackness and silence, he had felt a slow and creeping doubt infuse his marrow. By the time Thor had come to him, he had long ceased to sing and talk to himself with no one to hear him.

Thor ignored his outburst, as if it had been no more than ambient noise, the hoarse call of a raven in the background.

“I am not loosing you upon the universe again; do not mistake me. Your release shall be conditional, and I shall have my safeguards for your treachery. I will have you beside me, as when we were children. I do not trust you, brother, but I will have you nonetheless.” 

For a moment Thor’s gaze was hungry, the way it looked in battle.

“Whether under duress or coercion, whether you will it or not – is entirely up to you. I offer you your freedom from this bleak place, and my shared mantle as ruler of Asgard. I offer you a title of your own. You will be Prince Consort.”

“Prince Consort,” spat Loki, taken aback. His eyes narrowed in surprise as he tried to decipher Thor’s intentions, his ulterior motive for choosing such a phrase. “And exactly who would I be consort to?”

Thor’s hand, broad and punishing but well-formed, reached out all at once and grasped him by the jaw, and there was that alarming gentleness again.

“You would be mine,” he murmured. “You would be chief consort to me.”

Loki’s lip curled slowly, like burning paper.

“And tell me, who would I consort with?”

“The King of Asgard,” said Thor, on the edges of his breath. “No other.”

Loki stared at him, aware that at some point his hands had begun trembling of their own accord, but Thor did not see those, Thor did not look to them. Thor looked only at his face, at this close vantage, watching him for any reaction, for the slightest wavering or lapse, or moment of weakness to bring the hammer down.

He let out a wild laugh, derisive and hysterical. He knew he sounded like a madman, and perhaps that was what he stood to become, perhaps Thor was right and the decline had been so gradual, so incremental that he had not noticed it until now. He hated the loss of his self, the decorum and poise this place had stripped from him, leaving only desperation and resentment in their place.

“The King of Asgard would have a hostile stranger and call him brother, and have this brother in place of a lover. The mighty Thor, who commands the affection of all, cannot allow one man to hate him. Thor, always Thor - appearing out of nowhere to split the earth asunder, the golden god that mortals love on sight and daren’t disobey.” Loki sneered. “I am not one of them.”

“You are not mortal,” agreed Thor, holding his gaze in that unsettling and ingenuous way. “And you need not love me. You must only behave, and abide by the duties of a Prince Consort. For a trickster such as yourself it will be a simple exercise, and a trifling performance, for I know you have done worse.”

Loki felt his jaw tighten as Thor’s voice darkened, imbuing the last few words with unmistakable meaning, so there was no doubt what he referred to. His cheeks burned at the memory, and Thor’s knowledge of it all.

“I would rather do worse a thousand times than cleave to you, son of Odin. My hatred for you knows no season. It winters over, underground, dry and warm in a cellar, only to bloom forth once more with the coming of each Spring. I hate you with everything I am, and always will. You may free me from this place, and think to make of me a house-pet, a prized feather in your helmet of wings, but though I may obey, I will always hate you and seek your destruction.”

“And yet you are the God of Lies,” intoned Thor, cupping Loki’s face and pressing his thumb against his lower lip, causing Loki’s senses to flutter strangely, disturbingly. “So I wonder how it is you have never lied about your hatred of me. Why, of all things, are you so adamant to adhere to truth in this? It seems the very thing to exploit, the most convenient lie to tell. If indeed you hate me, might it not be easier to lie and speak of love? Might I grant you more latitude if you were to do so? Might my weakness forgive you more trespasses? Might I have taken your part against Odin’s even more than before?”

Thor’s lip curved at the corner, bemused and skeptical.

“…It does not track, brother, nor does it follow.” He snorted softly “Perhaps you are lying even now. But keep the lies you tell yourself; they harm no one apart from you.”

He felt that he was falling. Loki’s hands convulsed on the edge of the stone, and the rock cracked and crumbled in his grip. Obsidian shards bit into his palms and blood began to flow, but he hardly felt such things.

“I will have my answer now, brother,” Thor said gently. “No more delays.”

Loki wetted his dry lips with his tongue. When he swallowed, his throat felt thick and swollen as soaked leather. He could not think of a single thing to say. His brother had sparred him to a standstill, bested him in the one contest of strength in which Loki should have been able to claim victory. It was this place, he thought with hateful savagery. It had drawn the life out of him, diffused it into darkness and solitude…

“What about your earthbound wench?” Loki managed. It was a desperate act, a dying-struggle. The futility of it showed in his voice. “She, who loves you…”

“I have thought of that,” Thor said, with a shrewdness that he wore poorly. “It is not the same. This is politics.”

At that, Loki laughed. It was the first genuine laugh in a long time, and he did not like it. He turned the sound in the air, shaping it into a mockery of the simpering giggle of a maid. “Oh, my lord brother,” he breathed. “You would deny me even your heart. I shall surely pine away for want of you.”

“That’s enough,” Thor said.

“Enough?” Loki’s eyes blazed. There it was, that old fury. The rage that had driven him to the very ends of the universe. It had lain dormant, but it had not left him. And he was grateful for that, grateful beyond measure. “Enough to deny me my birthright? Enough to condemn me to this place? Enough to humiliate me with a title given out of pity and politicking? Yes, Thor, I should say that is enough. You are nothing if not thorough.”

“Brother…” Thor said quietly. He leaned closer, encroaching, and Loki knew that he could not bear another moment.

“Don’t call me that!” He lunged at him, forgetting magic and trickery and lies, for at that moment only brute and base physical contact would do. 

Thor caught him around the wrists, pushing him back against the stone. He pinned Loki’s hands, palms out, and a scowl came to mar his perfect face. “You have hurt yourself, brother.” Keeping his wrist securely held, he slid the ball of his thumb over Loki’s bleeding hand. “You ought to take better care.”

“It’s nothing,” Loki said softly. He writhed against his brother’s grip, but he had no hope or expectation of pulling away. Where was his towering and righteous anger now? It had fled him, abandoned him once again to his solitude.

“All the same…”

“I’ve had worse from you,” Loki snapped, cutting him off.

“Yes, I suppose you have. But that is all in the past.”

“For whom?” Loki whispered. But it mattered not. Thor had come upon the truth, naively and blithely, as if by accident. Loki had no fight left in him. When Thor loosened his hold, Loki slumped forward, clutching with numb fingers at his brother’s blazing armor. He pressed his forehead against the breastplate, and he was glad that it gave no comfort.

Thor touched the back of his neck, up under his hair. His skin felt hot; Loki was burned by it as if by a brand. “I will take you away from this place, brother.”

“Yes,” Loki replied. “Take it all away from me.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We weren't thinking of this as non-con when we wrote it, since Loki is a contrarian who manipulates situations constantly and lies about what he wants, but we can totally understand how someone might see it differently. So, **warnings for dub-con in this chapter**.

It did not take him long to slip back into his old skin. Not even an hour, he thought, with some considerable self-loathing, and he was back in the role of a privileged son of Odin, as a hand unto a glove; as if he’d never left.

“Left,” he muttered, as he sat in the perfumed, steaming waters of the broad, shallow bathing pool. He had not left. He had been exiled. Cast out. Discarded, like refuse. Brushed aside like the bitter remnants of Odin’s seed, only he was not of Odin’s seed, either, but another’s seed – the seed of the lesser kind.

Loki ran his hands over his wet hair, pushing it from back from his brow. Water dripped from his face and he stared straight ahead, his mind still irritatingly unresponsive from his confinement in the cavern. Would it be permanent, this damage? Would he always suffer this fog, this uncertainty? This weakness?

Loki’s lip twitched and his jaw tightened.

“A towel,” he yelled, abruptly, loudly, his voice petulant to his own ears. “I require a towel, now!”

The servants in the Hall of Asgard were unobtrusive, but that did not mean their absence or inattention was excusable. Loki’s anger redoubled, impotent and misdirected. They would pay if they did not come quickly. They would regret it.

“Do you think to ignore me?” 

If he was to be compelled to be in Asgard, and stripped of his autonomy, then he might as well exercise what free will remained to him.

He raised his voice, standing up as water streamed from his body.

“Does no one hear the demands of a god?”

The door opened and he looked to it expectantly, his gaze aflame.

It was not a servant that entered, but Thor. Loki’s lips parted, taken aback. Thor held a towel in his hand, and Loki could not help but note with displeasure that he seemed vaguely amused, despite the lack of expression on his face. His perfection was beautifully noncommittal at rest, the exception perhaps being that he looked as if he always brooded.

“I have heard your demand, brother-god,” Thor said, affably. “And I have come running to attend you.”

“I want no attention from you,” proclaimed Loki, as viciously as he could muster when he was naked and soaking wet, standing exposed before his brother’s unwavering, ice-blue gaze.

It was appalling, this indignity, to be naked before Thor, the god to end all gods. Thor! Other gods would aspire to be as well-minted. Loki knew that he did not have Thor’s sinewy strength or twining musculature. Nor his broad shouldered, thewy build or his fearful, lantern-jawed symmetry. He did not have his hair of windswept flax, like the sunbleached grasses that grew upon the tundra and glowed gold in the light of the lowering sun.

Thor had drawn close as Loki gazed, thoughts waxing rhapsodic without his permission, cataloguing all the many virtues of Odin’s true son, and finding them, as ever, greater then the sum of his own. Thor held out the towel as if it were an olive branch, and as he did, his eyes traveled downward.

“Why do you stare?” Loki breathed, abashed. 

He snatched the towel from Thor’s hand and crushed it against his loins, covering himself instinctively, shielding his cock from Thor’s sight.

“So it is no truncheon such as that which swings before the mighty Thor,” he spat. “What of it?”

Thor blinked.

“Tis a fine piece, a worthy warrior’s sword, brother. I’m sure it would well please many a woman.”

Loki glared.

“I have no use for women, nor do I care if they are pleased.”

“That is quite the mead hall boast,” Thor said, his lips quirked with amusement. “But then, you have never been conventional.”

“How dare you?” Loki blazed. His cheeks were aflame; his eyes sparked with dark fire. But the effect was somewhat muted as he struggled with his free hand to wrap the towel around his waist. “You have brought me here with no end in mind than to make sport of me. I will not stand for it. I will fling myself from the tower. Better I die on the paving stones then live to suffer the derision of a brute like you.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Thor said, unimpressed.

“Am I?” The towel now perilously cinched around his hips, Loki drew himself up to his full imperious height. “Think you I am afraid to fall, Thor? I’ve done it before.”

Thor’s expression soured with the memory, and Loki felt a flush of satisfaction at having goaded him so. Clutching the towel in one hand, he stepped out of the bath. At that moment, he fully intended to make good on his threat. But the polished marble floors of Asgard were slippery, and as soon as one wet foot had made contact with the ground, it immediately went out from under him. 

Almost before Loki could comprehend that he had slipped, Thor’s hand was on his arm, steadying him. He was very near to him now. How, Loki wondered, had he ever allowed his brother to come in so close?

“If you fall,” Thor said quietly, his voice a small and very intense heat against Loki’s ear, “then I will be there to catch you. Remember this, brother.”

Loki froze, his gaze fixed straight ahead, seeing nothing of the room but only the golden fringe of Thor’s hair in his peripheral vision. He felt as if the earth had vanished from beneath his feet, and that he were grasping. Grasping, but touching nothing but empty air.

The sensation lasted only a moment. He rounded on his brother and shoved him solidly in the chest. “Unhand me at once.”

Thor’s other hand closed around his wrist, pushing it down. His battle-roughened palms rasped and burned on Loki’s skin, but he was gentle as he had always been, ever mindful of his superior strength and all the mischief it could do.

Loki glared at him. “You have no other recourse, and so you result to physical intimidation. Your threats have no effect on me, Thor. I’m not afraid of you.” But Thor didn’t answer right away, and Loki felt himself broken down beneath the steady intensity of his gaze.

He squirmed a little in his grip, lowering his eyes. “Let go. You’re hurting me.”

Thor did let go, but only for a moment, long enough to shift his grip. He clamped one hand around Loki’s waist and slid the other up behind his neck. Then he drew him forward and kissed him.

Loki froze. His hands hung down at his sides, his fingers curling into impotent fists. His eyes were wide open, and that was how he knew that his brother’s remained closed. Loki did not react, not out of any conscious decision to remain aloof, but simply because he could not move, and even if he had been able to, he would not have had the slightest idea what to do.

Eventually, after what seemed years, Thor let him go. His pulse was high, his pupils dilated, his cheeks slightly in flush. This surprised Loki more than anything, for his own body had not reacted in the slightest. He felt as if all that was within him had been encased in ice.

“Why did you do that?” he whispered.

“What manner of a question is that?” said Thor. His strong brow had the knit of one who was very faintly incredulous but not particularly concerned. “I did it because I wished to do it, and so I have done.”

Loki stared at him, stricken, then in the next second violently wiped his hand across his mouth to dispel the unspeakable brand of Thor’s lips. Thor’s sculpted lips and impossibly well-formed mouth. 

“You toy with me,” he managed to say, and his voice was as quiet as the rustle of dry leaves.

“I am sincere with you, always,” countered Thor, calmly, lowering his head like a bull and fixing Loki with a steady, unyielding gaze. “And this you know as well as I. Let us not play games over it.”

“You mock me, son of Odin, even now,” Loki said, eyes narrowing, warming to his subject. “With this charade. You call me brother, and yet you would seduce my lips with your own as if I were a love-struck stranger? What, did you think me so starved for affection that I would fall at your feet? Did you think that no one could resist the charms of the thunder god, and that I would be undone at the touch of your mouth? And if I were,” Loki sneered, “if I were, you would then laugh, would you not? Mock the son of the other, the foolish unloved orphan for believing that a being such as you would…”

Loki broke off, furious at himself, a high flush staining the poreless skin that spanned his cheekbones.

Thor’s eyes rose to meet his, holding them.

“I see,” he said, quietly.

Loki was afraid, suddenly - afraid of Thor in a way that he had never been before.

He made to move past him, intending to sweep by – or at least to pass as sweepingly as a naked man without a cape or robes could manage - but Thor caught him easily, staying him with a hand, and it was enough. It was always enough. His touch was light on Loki’s shoulder, but behind it could be felt the hallmarks of an immovable force, like an edifice, a colossal menhir with roots down to the core of the earth. 

Loki’s eyes flicked toward him, warily. A low panic had begun to stir in his chest, creeping higher with each microsecond that Thor held him in check.

“Let us not play games,” repeated Thor, his gaze very still.

By the very nature of his being, Thor was strong as the elements – it was nothing for him to grasp Loki, one-handed, and abscond with him. He’d done it a number of times before, after all, much to Loki’s resentment and chagrin. So when Thor seized him now with that same inexorable grip, it was no novelty. He did not have time to react, nor struggle or mount any defense, or even to rail impotently at the injustice of it all. Thor simply did, and physics obliged Loki to go along.

In the next moment, Loki found himself flung upon the bed of furs in the corner. His impact was soft, softer than it usually was when Thor manhandled him with brotherly impunity. The furs on his bed were piled high, white and new, of an origin unknown to him – obviously the hide of some tundra-dwelling beast that lived and stalked through blizzards in the realms beyond. Thor would know of such things, and it was of course Thor who had ordered his former rooms made ready to receive their wayward tenant once more.

He lay on his back, seething, staring up at Thor, who looked down at him for a long moment, wordless before he suddenly knelt - before the pile of furs, before Loki as he reclined.

Loki had often seen Thor kneel; when he flew by the power of Mjölnir, every landing ended in a powerful crouch. It looked as if he had landed just now, here before Loki, except that his head was not bowed, and no clouds of dust surrounded him, and no lightning split the sky.

Loki stared, and as he did Thor’s hands came to rest high upon his legs, heavy with intent.

“What is this?” Loki demanded in a harsh whisper that he could not modulate or measure. “What is your game, brother?”

Thor’s hands cupped his inner thighs as if to part them like a maiden’s, to perform whatever ghastly act Thor did to win the love of women, which he did often enough, to Loki’s unending disgust.

“Brother,” intoned Thor. 

“I did not mean that,” Loki said at once.

“Long have I waited to hear that word from your lips again. It has been cold in your exile, even as I walk forever in the sun. Colder even than Jotunheim.”

Thor’s hands moved inward, unhesitating, palms sliding slowly over the sensitive junction between hip and thigh. Loki jerked.

“What you heard is nothing more than a vestigial reflex,” he muttered, wild-eyed. “Legs upon a snake. A tail upon a man. Thor is no brother to Loki, we have evolved past that. My tongue is not to be trusted by anyone.”

Least of all himself, thought Loki, bitterly, but this he did not say aloud.

“It is a fine piece,” Thor pronounced softly. “A worthy warrior’s piece. And I will show you how it should be tended.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re mad,” he exclaimed. 

Thor ignored him and bent his head. To his utter disbelief, Loki felt the touch of his mouth upon parts unknown, undiscovered. Places that Thor, even in all his brotherly impunity, had never trespassed.

He thrashed, but Thor’s hands upon his thighs were like the weight of Mjönir, holding him fast.

“Let me up! I’ll not be naked before you, son of Odin, and at your mercy. I’ll not endure this humiliation for your amusement. You retrieved me from the pit for this…this damaged act?” His breath came harshly to his chest. “Perhaps you are not so pure of heart. Perhaps you will no longer be able to lift your hammer after this, and your legend will be undone.”

“Quiet thyself,” murmured Thor. “Save your voice, for you will need it soon enough.”

The words had sounded like a threat, and indeed Loki took them very seriously as one. He felt the coldness that had taken root in his bowels spreading all through him, infusing every limb, and he shivered in spite of the heat of the chamber, warmed by the roaring blaze in the hearth.

“You tremble like a maiden in flower,” Thor said. Loki felt each word exhaled against the naked skin of his thighs, felt them as if they were blows.

Thor shifted, moving over him. He kept one hand wrapped around the shaft of Loki’s cock, not squeezing or stroking but letting it lie agonizingly in the hollow of his palm. He raised himself with the other arm, and Loki felt the scalding brand of his breath on his stomach, his chest, his throat. Then they were face to face, so close that Thor’s features blurred into an indistinct tableau of gold and blue.

Loki looked away.

“All is well,” Thor coaxed. “I shall do right by you, as ever I strive to.”

Loki’s throat clenched, clamping down on the words he would have spoken. “I don’t… I didn’t know…”

“What do you think the role of a consort is, brother? I thought you, in all your cleverness, would have guessed what the title entailed.”

Loki rallied himself and turned to look Thor in the eye. “What if I tell you I don’t want this?”

“Then I will be disinclined to believe you,” Thor replied. “For you are not above lying to do injury only to yourself.”

His massive fist tightened around Loki’s cock, and Loki’s head swam. He felt that all of his self, all of his being, was draining down out of his higher faculties and into the hard knot between his thighs.

Thor kissed him briefly on his unresponsive mouth, on his throat, on the jut of his collarbone. Moving downward again. In his mind, Loki could see himself struggling. The images came to him very clearly, of his hands tearing at Thor’s hair, of his nails scoring his flawless cheeks, but in actuality, he did not move at all.

A pale, almost invisible dusting of stubble graveled Thor’s jaw, and Loki could feel it rasping against his skin. The harsh caress of Thor’s cheeks, followed by the gentler touch of his lips, moving with slow method across Loki’s chest, pausing to impart close attention to a nipple, and then continuing downward, to his stomach, his navel, the dark delta of hair at the apex of his thighs.

Loki twisted his fingers in the furs. If he could not struggle, then he would remain immobile, immovable. He felt he understood Thor’s perverse ambition only vaguely, but he was determined to fight against it with all his will.

The hand around his cock moved slowly, stroking him hard. A bead of clear liquid formed at the tip, and Thor slicked his thumb over it. It burst, surprisingly icy on Loki’s skin. Thor noticed the disquieting temperature – indeed, Loki thought, he must have, for he could not have missed it – but he made no remark nor even moved to look up from what he was doing.

“This is sick,” announced Loki, staring at the ceiling with the most petulant expression he could muster.

Blond head bowed, Thor ignored him. He was absorbed in something else, something unfathomable, and it vaguely irked Loki, that silence that he did not understand, the attention that was elsewhere and he was about to repeat himself when he suddenly felt Thor’s hand give way, only to be replaced by something else, something unthinkable and unmistakable.

Loki shot up at the waist, eyes wide, incredulity mixed with hesitation as he gazed at his foster brother, who still pinned him fast.

“Thor,” he said, urgently, his voice shifting unbidden, reverting without permission to the tone of the careful, mindful little brother, the one who always followed just behind his impulsive older sibling preaching restraint, his young brow notched with concern. “Thor, you must stop now – this has gone far enough. Something will happen. Something strange is already happening! I can feel it.”

Thor drew back just enough to laugh. The sound was soft as the furs beneath Loki’s bare back, resonant with that depth of chest that nature had seen fit to bestow upon his brother, along with all her other capricious gifts.

Thor’s lips hovered near Loki’s cock, his breath glancing against the sensitive skin.

“So my brother feigns coyness and play-acts the novice. But at last my brother speaks, and I know him. The brother I have known all my life.”

Anxiously, Loki appealed with his eyes.

“Please,” he said. “You always push too far, Thor. You’re rash. You know it. You mustn’t do this.”

“Mustn’t I,” said Thor, unconvinced as usual.

He angled his eyebrows insolently and dove back downward, and Loki’s gaze followed helplessly, watching as Thor’s lips parted around his cock.

Feeling it was one thing, but seeing was quite another. Loki’s eyes were filled with the sight of Thor on his knees, hair spread over his shoulders like golden banners – and Loki’s cock engulfed to the hilt of his heroic throat, which pulsed with strength in its hollow. 

The Mighty Thor serving Loki the Lesser as if it were nothing at all. As if it cost him nothing.

Because it doesn’t, thought Loki bitterly. Because Thor has learned humility on earth, and Thor has endless reserves with which to give.

He has everything. And now he is self-actualized as well.

Loki realized his thighs were shuddering, his body responding against his will.

“What are you doing to me?” he demanded, alarmed.

Thor did not answer, and Loki felt himself pushed onward mercilessly. His back to the abyss, his heels up against the very lip of the treacherous precipice. He had at first thought that he might, by force of will alone, resist Thor’s unfraternal advances, but his body betrayed him. His feet dug restlessly into the furs, and his hips twisted up against Thor’s mouth. Thor met him stroke for stroke, and Loki clamped his teeth down viciously on his lower lip, cutting short an undignified cry.

He had been lonely, he thought then, and his captivity had worn on his nerves. Even now, he did not know how long he had been confined beneath the earth; he had pretended careless indifference in the matter, but the truth was he had been afraid to find out. The truth was, he had been tested in his strength and his fortitude, and he had been found wanting, and so would it always be. Until Ragnarok.

Furious, he plunged his fingers into Thor’s golden mane, and forced his head down. He jerked hard, wanting to hurt him but knowing that he would never be able to dent his brother’s impenetrable armor. Thor let himself be prodded, adjusting his angle to accommodate Loki’s bruising pace. Loki kept pulling at him, as if he longed to wound him, as if he hated him. As if he had hated him for so long now that he had forgotten the moment or the reason.

He came, gasping, his eyes pinched shut and his lip drawn back from his teeth in a snarl. Thor stayed down until it was over, swallowing his seed to the last bitter drop. It gave Loki a little time to compose himself, and by the time Thor lifted his head, he had scourged the last traces of pleasure from his face, leaving in their stead only brittle bewilderment.

“It’s cold,” Thor said, passing the back of his hand over his damp lips. “How curious and strange.” 

“What...?” Loki started to say, and then all at once he understood. He turned away with a jerk of his head, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’ll never forgive you for this.”

In the aftermath of his climax, he could feel the coldness returning to his blood, rivers of fast-flowing ice surging through his veins. His lips and his nail beds turned blue, and when he let out a shaky exhale it was accompanied by a plume of frozen breath. The still-damp ends of his hair froze, steaming in the heat of the blazing hearth.

“There there, brother,” Thor said. His hand came down on Loki’s shoulder. Comradely now, with no ulterior motives.

“Get away from me.”

“I forget sometimes, how sensitive you are.”

“Don’t touch me! You... you brute beast!” Loki jerked to his feet. His legs threatened to turn liquid beneath him, to spill him back into that bed of iniquity at his brother’s side, but he raged at himself inwardly, and he managed to keep his footing. Dragging one of the furs with him and clutching it closely around himself, he fully intended to storm out of the bedchamber. But when Thor called after him he stumbled, and he limped the rest of the way to the door, without once looking back.


	3. Chapter 3

In spite of everything, Loki was still confident he would have been able to go through with the strange union, if it were not for the visit that Sif paid him that evening. Loki was engaged in the task of instructing the servants how to most thoroughly rearrange the effects in his rooms. He could see Thor’s efficient and artless hand everywhere he looked, and he did not like it. 

“Congratulations to you on the eve of your union,” Sif had said. 

It had thrown him, to have it so cavalierly said, and if all of Asgard knew that he was to be Thor’s second, it was infinitely worse that all of Asgard knew he was to be Thor’s intimate possession as well.

Something had snapped in him, tenuous and fragile.

“This _union_ is not my will,” he had hissed, and had ordered her out of his chambers, robes thrashing about him as he slammed the door and locked it, charmed it sealed with all the tricks he possessed.

Now he stared, fuming, at the damning bed where Thor had forced pleasure upon him, the maniac.

It was not much longer, not long at all, before he heard Thor himself at the door, his voice low and brooking no argument.

“Unbind your tricks and open this door. You may resent me until Ragnarok and beyond, but you will not treat Sif thus, Loki. She has done nothing to earn your ire.”

“Go away, Thor,” Loki said, with a petulant sigh. “You bore me with your insistence. I will come out when I please, and not before.”

“You will come out now,” corrected Thor, calmly, “or Mjölnir shall come in. Do you think she cannot smash your parlor tricks like icicles? All of your power is but an illusion.”

He heard a faint thump of a sound and could imagine what it was - Thor resting his heavy brow against the door in a moment of respite.

“...I grow bored as well, Loki, and tired of fighting. But my fortitude is without end. I will endure, and you are only prolonging the inevitable.”

Loki felt a cold sheen of sweat condense on the back of his neck. A splinter of dread lodged itself in his stomach, rubbing rawly, not allowing him to forget its presence there for even a moment. He held still for what felt a long time, and during the entirety of it, Thor did not move from his post by the door. All without was silent; Loki heard not the scuff of boots on the marble floor, nor the sound of breathing, nor even his brother’s patient and coaxing voice.

At last, Loki went to the door and pulled it open a crack, scarcely enough to peer out. “I will not leave, but you may enter, if you must.”

Thor swept inside, and Loki retreated before him. “I’m glad you are finally being reasonable, brother,” Thor said.

“Reasonable?” Loki sniffed. “Yes, I suppose it is good sense to not want my personal effects smashed to bits by your heavy hand.”

Thor cocked his hands on his hips. To the casual observer, it was a posture of forthrightness, of swift and decisive action, but Loki, who knew his brother better than anyone, recognized it at once as a nervous affectation.

“I am sorry,” Thor said.

Loki sucked in a sharp breath. “You…? What do you want? What mean you, coming here and saying such things to me?”

“It seems that I have wronged you, brother.”

“Brother?” Loki spat. “Brother, you call me? After what you have done? You’re lucky, Thor. Lucky that we are not truly blood-kin. I would have thought you would have been happy to finally accept it.”

Thor cringed.

“Yes, well. About that...”

He put his hand over his mouth for a moment, then rubbed it down over his chin.

“It seems we have been laboring under a misconception, Loki.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed.

“What do you mean?” he demanded, taken aback by Thor’s uncharacteristic hesitation. He’d been ready for another round of antagonism, another bout of sibling pugilism. His expectations were abruptly left unmet.

Thor sighed, and his brow creased handsomely. Loki admired that through his narrowed eyes, and hated them both for it.

“Can I sit?” he asked, after a moment.

“As if I could stop you,” muttered Loki, crossing his arms, making a show of vexation - but in truth he was curious at what manner of thing might cause the Mighty Thor to set aside his jocular bravado for such rare solemnity.

Suddenly, Loki felt a distant sting of alarm, like the strike of a bell.

“Not Father,” he managed, in haste, through lips that felt unresponsive. “Has something befallen Father, Thor? Tell me if -”

Thor snorted softly. He did not meet Loki’s seeking eyes.

“Aye, something befell Father once. Or rather, Father befell someone. Who in turn fell heavy with child.”

Loki’s brows worked incredulously as he waited for more, but Thor seemed to be taking his time, brooding.

“Well?” he exclaimed finally. “What in Jotunheim does that mean? I had never thought you much of a poet, but I must admit that is some enigmatic free verse indeed.”

Thor’s gaze turned to meet Loki’s then, rapturously blazing blue.

“Is it not revealing, what comes from one’s mouth in duress? You disavow us all, you disavow Asgard, but when the hammer comes down, all of that is vanished like leaves. You call him Father,” he said, in a low and steady voice. “And well may you, for he is. Frost Giant you may be, but not by Laufey.”

For a long time, Thor was quiet. So long that Loki began to wonder if he intended to answer at all, indeed if he had even heard the question. Loki felt as if he had been arrested in time, frozen in this moment, unable to move forward until Thor finally got around to saying what he had come to say. What he seemed, now, to have no intention of saying at all.

Loki swallowed dryly, around a knot in his throat. 

“Brother…” he said carefully, hoping that the appellation would bring Thor around. Loki’s heart was pounding in his breast. He did not hate the word, nor Thor for hearing it, nor even himself for speaking it, but it irritated him some that Thor did not even seem to notice.

“Father is your father,” Thor said at last. Now that he had worked himself up to it, the words came easily, as if he had rehearsed them, which indeed he probably had. “Your father in more than name, that is to say. For it was his seed which took root in the womb of one of Jotunheim’s unlucky maidens…”

Loki was on his feet before he knew that he had moved. He stood there, looking down on Thor and feeling himself tremble in every limb. When he spoke, his voice was considerably weaker than he had expected it to be.

“You lie…”

Thor shook his head. “In Father’s time, they still followed the old ways. Things were done differently. A warrior could still take a girl in the heat of battle, posses her body. And so when Father came upon the temple priestess, abandoned at the altar, he claimed her.”

“You lie… you lie…”

“I would not lie,” Thor said, with all the force of a hammerstrike. “Not to cause you pain, brother. You deserve to know everything.”

“Then why keep it from me this long?” Loki realized he was shaking, and he sank back down in his chair, drawing his hands into his cloak. “While you schemed to have me for your bed…”

“I didn’t know,” Thor said. “May I never lift Mjölnir again if I am lying to you about this. Father meant to keep it, for all time, but when he discovered what I had planned, he told me the whole tale. He said it was to prevent a terrible curse from falling upon our House.”

“He is a monster,” Loki murmured, his benumbed lips stumbling over the words. A horrible chill had descended upon him once more, turning his blood to ice.

“Things have changed since then,” Thor said diplomatically. “And for the better. We are more civilized now.”

“He’s a monster.” Loki lifted his eyes and looked his brother full in the face, but even the blazing heat of Thor’s countenance did not warm him. “As are you.”

Thor jumped, as if he had been kicked. “Loki, please. I’m your brother. By blood, yes, but also by nature. I want to help you.”

“Where is she?”

“Pardon me?”

“The Jotunheim woman! The one our Father - no, I will not call him that - the one that loathsome blackguard defiled! Where is she? I want to go to her.”

“She’s dead, Loki,” Thor said.

“Very well. Then I shall join her there.”

Thor hunched forward where he sat, letting his forearms rest on his thighs, letting his broad hands find his head and drive themselves into his blond glory, clutching briefly in quiet frustration before he released it once more.

“No,” he said. And a moment later, a godlike roar. “No!”

Thor surged to his feet and Loki flinched back slightly to give him room, almost as a reflex.

“...You will not. You will do none of this. You will listen like a man, like a warrior, and cease to act as a child. You will hear unpleasant truths, and you will abide them.”

His voice softened, very slightly, as his gaze grew more intimate, more acute.

“...and you will hear my apology, brother. You will hear my apology for the trespass I committed when I pressed my lust upon you and knew not what I did. Neither of us could know.”

Thor’s eyes cast down, ennobled in that gesture.

“I am sorry, Loki. There is nothing more can be said or done. I should not have sought this...enmeshment with you. I should not have come to know you as I did. And I no longer seek this unnatural union.”

Loki stared, lips parted, fingers insensate. After a moment he let out a laugh, and was unable to keep a note of hysteria from it.

“After all of this, that is what plagues your mind? That I am truly your half-brother?”

Thor shook his head, gaze distant.

“The woman is long dead, Loki. As long even, as you have been alive. She would have taken you with her into oblivion, but Father would not have it. There is no use crying over spilt mead. But I am your brother, and I am living, and I implore you not to harden your heart against me any more than you already have.”

“You say you have come to apologize, and yet you ask more of me than I could ever give.” Loki pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes, pushing hard enough that he saw sparks of blue lightening. He could feel that his skin was very cold. 

“Please go, Thor.”

“Brother…”

“Go, I said!” Loki did not lift his eyes. He didn’t need to see Thor now, didn’t need to make the situation any more complicated than it already was. “I won’t do anything rash. You have my word, though you do not need it. Both of us know I am incapable.”

“I am sorry, Loki,” Thor said quietly. “Sorry it has come to this.”

“I bet you are.” Loki shook his head violently, and he felt his hair slap against his cheeks. He had no windswept, flaxen mane like his brother’s. Thor’s hair seemed made to be tousled and slept on and carelessly ruffled. As for Loki, he knew that the slightest strand out of place served only to make him look ridiculous.

“Just leave me a while,” Loki amended. “Just let me think. I must set my lands in order, Thor.”

“Yes, I understand,” Thor replied. “But if you need anything…”

Loki did not reply, and Thor did not finish. He went out quietly, shutting the door behind.


	4. Chapter 4

Loki moved swiftly through the halls of Asgard. It was late, and the resplendent golden corridors had been dimmed to moonlit silver. Loki had dressed in the short tunic and long, embroidered cloak of a page. The hood was pulled close around his face, and he had cast a glamour over his features to obscure them.

It had come to this; he had been reduced to creeping about like thief in his own home. But thief he was resigned to be, for he was out of alternatives. The sting of Thor’s revelation to him that afternoon was still fresh in Loki’s mind, but his first clear thought, after the initial outrage had passed, was that he must not suffer this indignation in silence. He must have revenge. Father – Odin that was to say – had revealed the truth now in the hopes that Loki might retreat into the closet like the shameful skeleton he was, but he had not considered that Loki, who had already lost everything at his hand, might no longer fear disgrace or dishonor.

Outside of the great oaken door to Thor’s bedchamber, Loki paused. The door was utterly smooth, without handle, knob, latch, or knocker. It fit flush into the frame, leaving a gap not even wide enough for a piece of parchment to slip through. Loki removed his glove and ran his naked fingertips over the gilded wood. It was locked from within, but the latches sprang back at Loki’s touch and the door swung open soundlessly and without resistance.

Loki took a candle from a sconce in the wall, shielding the flame with his hand as he stepped inside, but it seemed that he did not need it. The lights still burned in Thor’s room that night. Though Loki’s soft calfskin boots made no sound on the marble floor, Thor came out from the inner rooms to meet him.

“I thought I sent you all on to bed,” he said, not unkindly. “I told you, I don’t need anything tonight.”

It was easier than Loki had thought it would be, facing him like this. He anchored his feet defiantly, and threw back the hood of his cloak and said, “And what if it is I who requires something?”

“Brother? You—“

Here, Thor seemed to run out of things to say entirely. He stood staring, his lips parted in bewilderment. There were a thousand things Loki might have supplied at that moment, but he kept his mouth shut. Thor was suffering, and that was quite enough for him.

“I don’t want to fight,” Thor finished at last, softly.

“That is fortuitous, for I did not come here to do battle.” Loki set the candle aside and occupied his hands with arranging the folds of his cloak. “But we must face some, as you put it, unpleasant truths, must we not?”

“What more can I say to you?” Thor said. His voice seemed strange; perhaps he was pleading. Loki had never heard his brother plead for anything before. “What can I do, to right this awful injustice?”

“You can do nothing,” Loki said. “Even the mighty Thor is helpless before the sins of his father. But you can, perhaps, help me another way.”

“Anything,” Thor said instantly.

Loki smoothed his hands over the front of his cloak, as if brushing away invisible dust motes. “Have you not considered why the odious Odin chose now of all times to reveal to you his secret? He could have taken it to the grave with him, as was surely his plan all along…”

“Because of our union,” Thor said at once.

“Which I had no intention of agreeing to anyway. But he had to do something to put the whole notion out of your head. After all, he couldn’t have you feather-clucking around trying to shield me. His intent all along has been to send me back underground.”

“He would not! You’re—“

“His own flesh and blood?” Loki laughed derisively. “It’s not as if that stopped him before. I frighten him, Thor. And I frighten the Council of Asgard. In fact, you are the only one who lacks the good sense to be afraid. It’s just good politics, to have me out of the way.”

Thor’s hands clenched into massive fists. “I won’t allow it.”

“Then prove it,” Loki said. “Prove to me how serious you are.”

“What would you have of me, brother?”

Loki looked at him steadily, without flinching or blinking. It was easier now. He had taken all the proper precautions, erected walls of untruth and trickery and misdirection, through which he could look at his brother like one watches the shadow of an eclipse pass across a sheet of paper.

“I want to proceed with the ceremony. I will be your consort, Thor.”

Thor’s eyes narrowed, and he said nothing at once.

Loki knew that Thor, despite his lack of good sense, was no idiot conceived by a finger. And he knew that look. In turn he tried to look particularly sincere, keeping his eyes wide and his lips just slightly parted. Assiduous. Yes, that would do. He had often looked in exactly this way when he pleaded with Thor - to put away his sword, not to be so rash. Like he had when Thor first barged into Jotunheim, headstrong and without humility, urging temperance - and now even Loki himself could not remember if he had been sincere at the outset, or merely setting up appearances from the beginning for his own attack on the Frost Giants.

“I do not trust you,” rumbled Thor.

“I have given you precious reason to trust me of late,” admitted Loki, and that much was true and he needed no glamour to sell it.

“You spared Father, saved him from Laufey as he lay helpless in Odinsleep. I cannot think you do not hold some love for the old man yet.”

Thor’s brow was weighted with skepticism.

“...And yet full well I know you hold no love for me, Loki. Would you be bound to one you despise purely for something so petty as vengeance?”

“Not vengeance,” Loki said. “Protection.”

Thor’s golden brow furrowed, like an imperfect statue cast into a furnace. “Explain yourself.”

“What more must I say, Thor? Take me as your consort and Odin will not be able to touch me.”

“He will not touch you as long as I live. This I swear to you, brother.”

“And if you do not live?” Loki jerked his eyes away from Thor’s face at the last moment. He had felt something unsteady in his countenance when he spoke those words, a faulty seam on the perfect mask he wore. Fortunately, the gesture seemed to have the desired effect: Thor came forward a step, and took Loki’s shoulders in his hands.

“Cavorting with Earth-mortals as you insist on doing.” Loki had to speak quickly now. It was suddenly hard to breath, a struggle to force the words out. “There are things out there, Thor. Forces so malevolent that Asgard could not even dream of them. I would not deny you Valhalla, but you might bother to make provisions for me…”

“There must be another way,” Thor said.

“There isn’t,” Loki snapped. “If there were, do you think that I would be here prostrating myself before you?”

Thor turned him around slowly, and Loki let himself be turned, or rather did not resist, for of course the laws of physics sneered that it was not up to him, not really, and any semblance of choice he had in the matter was an illusion allowed by Thor. Funny that Thor should trade in illusions of his own.

As he met Thor’s unyielding gaze, Loki strove to keep his eyes steady, fearless, defiant.

Thor spoke with a heaviness that sounded as if seven heavens weighed down upon him.

“Very well, brother. You have convinced me. Let us go forward with the ceremony, and let us be united in name and spirit. I shall not disappoint you, Loki, nor shall I ever forsake you.”

Thor paused, then released him with a halting, sturdy clap on both shoulders, like he might with any of his bawdy fellow warriors or comrades-in-arms.

For a moment, Loki felt slighted without even registering why. But then all this passed as Thor strode to the window and glanced out, surveying his kingdom, no doubt - his brow resolute and his lips set and implacable.

“Do not worry, brother. There shall be no consummation for you to fear, no unnaturalness. We shall make a fine figurehead, and no more. The platonic ideal.”

Loki was left standing alone, in his shabby disguise. Everything had happened just as he had planned, just as he had foreseen, and yet he was left feeling strangely unsatisfied. Thor had gone along with it far too willingly, and even Loki’s mad plan, his last desperate grab at vengeance, had seemed so solid and reasonable when repeated back to him in Thor’s serious, melancholy voice.

There had to be more, another humiliation to heap upon both their heads. Loki had gone so far now that he would almost welcome it.

In a moment, he had decided. He reached up and clawed at the pin holding his cloak, pulling it free so that the heavy garment fell pooling around his feet. He stepped forward, and as he drew closer to Thor’s sturdy and unsuspecting back, he felt the world tilt disorientingly upon its axis. He pressed his palms flat against Thor’s shoulder blades, and he felt his brother’s body draw up taut beneath his touch.

“It is only the ‘ideal’ which suits you, Thor,” Loki murmured. He kept his voice pitched low; he was afraid of what notes might appear in it if he did not.

Slowly, he leaned in, resting his weight on Thor’s back. Uneasy or not, Thor was strong enough to hold them both.

“I have asked a great sacrifice of you,” Loki went on. His lips were up against Thor’s shoulder, feathering against his leather armor every time they stirred to shape a word. “And you have given it nobly. I, too, am willing to make a sacrifice.”

Loki slid his hand down Thor’s back, around the curve of his ribcage, and then he plunged downward. His fingertips brushed over Thor’s abdomen, rasping over his belt. It was only when he reached the hollow between his brother’s hips that he hesitated, unable to bring himself to go on.

Fortunately, he did not have to.

Thor grasped his wavering hand and immobilized it in his own, trapping it against the hard muscles of his stomach, stilling its embryonic tremble.

For a heartstopping moment Loki was certain that Thor had commandeered his hand in order to force it more quickly toward its indecent destination, and a wave of anxiety gripped him, along with another strange, surging, visceral feeling he did not much want to contemplate - but Thor made no such overture.

Instead he bowed his blond head.

His panic was reaching a fever pitch when suddenly Thor threw back his head and Loki realized he was laughing.

“Oh Loki, you are too self-sacrificing,” he said, in a thunderous rumble, underscored with ebullient good-nature, and a touch of black amusement. “I know that others will call you insincere and conniving, but this only shows how truly generous you are, brother.”

Loki’s lips parted, insensate.

His hand was falling asleep beneath the press of Thor’s broad palm and when Thor released it all at once, it burst into pins and needles.

Thor turned and braced him by the shoulders, bringing them brow to brow and looking him in the eyes with a broad smile.

“And I will never abuse that generosity. I swear it!”

Loki let out his breath in a sharp sigh. A cloud of frozen vapor formed in the air, and only then did Loki realize that he felt very cold inside. He reached up, placing his hands over those on his shoulders, digging his icy fingers into Thor’s skin.

“So, I can no longer be trusted to decide what I want?” Loki’s voice was pitched low. He thought that it might sound seductive, but he wasn’t sure. “Is this the price of being your consort? The incomparable Thor will now make my choices for me?”

Thor was no longer laughing. He scrutinized Loki with unblinking intensity, and Loki tried to hold his eyes but his vision kept slipping out of focus, so that Thor’s face blurred before him into impressionistic daubs of blue and gold.

At last, Thor patted his shoulders once and drew away. “You are too pure of heart, dear brother,” he said, very quietly and seriously.

He turned away, and Loki was left staring at his turned back. A small, reasonable, didactic voice in the back of Loki’s mind was cautioning him to let the matter drop, to leave well enough alone, but he had never listened to that particular voice before. He lunged forward, grabbing Thor by the arm, as if to wrench him around by brute force, but Thor turned back at the first touch and Loki staggered a step, off-balance, before he could right himself.

“You wanted me well enough yesterday,” he snapped. “What has changed? Did I really disappoint you so?”

“Brother, you are being unreasonable,” Thor cautioned.

“It is your expectations which are unreasonable!” Loki was not shouting, but he had raised his voice, striving for the imperious, unbroken tones of a once almost-God. “I am a son of Asgard, and I will not be treated as a mere conquest, Thor!”

Thor’s brow furrowed.

“This is not your choice alone, Loki,” he said, holding out a hand, half-accusatory, half-staying.

He cast about for a moment, brooding, then finally turned to face Loki once more.

“Yes, it’s true I would have had you before today. I would have had you, Loki, and gladly, and well - I assure you of that.” 

Loki, taken aback, crossed his arms and stared. 

Thor snorted and shook his head. He leveled his gaze at Loki, intense and unrelenting, charged as the air before a storm.

“You have no idea.”

“I...” Loki broke off.

“Your eyes look so wide and unsure,” Thor said, quietly. “You’ve looked at me so before, as I charged into Jotunheim - uncertain of my intentions, afraid of the consequences of my rash and impulsive nature. Reckless, so incautious I was, Loki! But since my folly I have sworn to do better, by Father, by Asgard and by Midgard. And now, to think I’ve placed this burden upon you once more with my lust. Now I can only think of how you shook with horror as I pressed my suit upon you, how you begged me to stop - just as before.”

“I am not afraid of you,” breathed Loki, and it was the lie to end all lies.

“Of course not, brother,” said Thor, raising his eyebrows, his voice gaining a tone of infinite reason. “And you have no reason to be. I have sworn an oath before Mjölnir to do right by you.”

Loki glowered, shaking. His emotions were often tangled now. He could not follow a single thread with his fingers. In that moment he no longer knew what he had come for.

“Perhaps I wish to be consort in more than name, Thor. Perhaps for once I wish to have a purpose beyond mere window dressing. Grant me that much.”

“You will be my brother, Loki,” Thor said. “You will be everything. Forever and always.”

Loki opened his mouth to respond, but he soon realized he did not have a single thing to say. Thor had not struck him speechless; he had simply rendered anything Loki might utter ridiculous, superfluous, and painful for both of them.

There was a blunt, cold pressure behind his eyes. For a single panicked instant, Loki was afraid that he would cry, but then the sensation passed.

“I see,” he said hoarsely. “You have made your position abundantly clear, Thor.”

He was backing away now, one slow step at a time, until his heel caught in the crumpled heap of his discarded cloak. Loki gasped, and stooped in a flurry of movement, and swept the garment around his shoulders.

“Brother, wait…” Thor said.

“I thank you for your candor,” Loki went on. He tried to look Thor in the face, but his gaze kept slipping off, as if his brother had been sculpted from ice. “And I thank you for seeing me at such short notice.”

“I wish you would not go away in this state.”

“Good night,” Loki said, his voice a rasp. He turned on his heels and fled.


	5. Chapter 5

It was surreal, thought Loki, that they had all come for this charade.

He stood in the shadows at the back of the great hall, staring out over a sea of Asgardians, the backs of their heads gleaming blond and red and chestnut; there was only Sif with her locks of black, and Loki could not help but smile darkly to himself, remembering how she’d come by those.

Twelve blacksmiths had worked day and night to forge the wedding-armor he now wore. When they brought it in and presented it to him, Loki had intended to dismiss it outright in a show of caged contempt, but as he flicked an insolent glance at the seven men who held it in their arms, his gaze was caught and held in the luminous curves of rose-gold; his lips parted and his breath was somehow stolen.

It was resplendent, opulent and manful - worthy of a warrior prince and not merely a prince consort. The blacksmiths of Asgard had surely outdone themselves for this, the union of their beloved King. Though at his core Loki felt a black resentment over that, at once more reaping the warmth of Thor’s cast-off light, he could not bring himself to disparage the beautiful wargarments.

He had said nothing, nothing at all as they dressed him - only closed his eyes as each perfectly fitted piece slid into place, becoming almost part of him. His hair was brushed with a golden comb, and when they placed the intricate helmet upon his head the weight of it felt sublime; the sides carved gently along the line of his cheekbones, hugging the structure of his face, the metal was smooth and conformed to his skull like a carapace.

When he opened his eyes, he had been startled to realize he was looking out the eyeholes of a visor.

“What is this?” he had demanded, raising his fingers to touch it, incredulous and bewildered.

“Your warrior’s veil, my lord Loki.”

“Warrior’s veil,” he repeated.

“Aye, for the King to lift.”

Loki’s brows drew inward, taken aback.

“There is...a precedent, for this? When will he...raise the visor?”

“Upon the bonding announcement, my lord. It will keep in place til then.”

Loki’s lip curled derisively.

“We’ll see about that,” he muttered, but when he tried to push it up he found it immovable. “What is this?” he exclaimed, in a fit of pique.

“It’s charmed, my lord, and will respond only to his hand.”

Loki had stared as a cold fury rose up inside him, thick and gelid.

“Only to his hand,” he echoed, in a low, dangerous tone. “Like Mjölnir?” His voice raised. “Subject to the hand of the Mighty Thor?”

“As his own is charmed,” the manservant said. “Until your hand should raise it.”

Loki paused, as his anger stabilized oddly, like an icicle that had frozen in mid-trickle, stilled and aborted, unsure of where to go.

“I see,” he said, trailing off, eyes averting.

He had been mollified enough to allow them to finish his dressing, and now he stood in the wings of the archway, awaiting his brother’s glorious presence.

Awaiting the inevitable.

Loki knew that Thor had been attended to in his own quarters as he had; purified in the bathhouse with heat and steam before a roaring fire, his hair washed and perfumed, his body anointed with oil and fragrant herbs and musk.

It was what preceded every ritual.

But as for what to expect when Thor actually appeared, Loki could only bitterly think of the sun, each time it deigned to actually grace the earth.

Presently, Thor did come. Loki knew he had come, because the hall fell into a hush all at once, and that hush set Loki’s teeth on edge. He refused to look, to give him the satisfaction. He kept his eyes forward, aware of his brother’s presence only in his limited peripheral vision.

Thor stood at the back of the room, on the opposite side from Loki, a colonnade between them. With the brief sounding of a warhorn they were called forward, to walk abreast down the long aisle.

It was quiet in the Great Hall, and as Loki approached the altar he had to be conscious of each step, had to force himself to take it with deliberate, dignified gravity. They were all watching him, all thinking the things that they must be thinking about him, but he was determined not to run or cower before their eyes.

He kept his head up, shoulders back. His eyes were focused on nothing in particular. He felt that the golden light must look very artistic on his armor, and that his cloak swirled dramatically with each step.

The worst was already over, he thought. He could go through with this.

Only when he reached the foot of the altar did he hesitated. Odin had come out from the antechamber in the embroidered robes which announced the office of High Priest, and he stood looking down at his sons, his face immobile and without accusation.

Loki realized that they had not seen each other since he had returned from underground. Odin had kept apart from him, unseen, and passed judgments arbitrary and cruel.

So like the god he was, Loki thought, and he felt a wave of hysterical laughter threaten to burst from him. His lips twisted into a bitter smile, hidden by the visor of his helm. No one could possibly have seen it, and yet it seemed to him that Odin had. The unkind lines of his face had deepened. Loki bit his lower lip hard and banished the expression from his face, but still he was helpless to ascend the altar and stand before his father. His feet seemed rooted to the spot, his body pinned and lashed by Odin’s unblinking stare.

Loki tore his eyes away, but with the visor in place he couldn’t see much. Beside the altar stood the seven ceremonial witnesses. Hogun was among them, and Sif. She tried to catch Loki’s eye, and he looked away quickly.

When he turned back to the altar, Thor was holding out a hand to him. Loki grabbed onto it, and clutched it hard. Thor led him up the steps, and Loki felt as if he were surfacing after being immersed in Arctic waters.

Odin spoke for what seemed a long time, but Loki heard very little of the ceremony. His pulse was throbbing in his ears, and the heavy carapace that surrounded his head gave every sound the tinny, insubstantial quality of an echo. When Thor took him by the wrist, Loki reacted as if by instinct, turning his hand to clasp his brother’s powerful forearm. Odin draped an ornamental tapestry over their entwined arms, wrapping it in rich, binding folds from wrist to bicep, each to each.

Odin’s voice was plangent enough with authority, though no chest resonant rumble like Thor’s.

“We declare ourselves witnesses that Thor bondest Loki as his consort in lawful union, and with this taking hold of hands thou promisest and engagest to fulfill and observe the whole of the compact between you, which has been notified in the hearing of witnesses without duplicity or cunning, as a real and authorized compact. What say you, Thor?”

“I say yes,” proclaimed Thor, without hesitation. “May it be ever like this, for the good of Asgard.”

Loki felt the world winnow in, suddenly, as he realized that Thor had made the vow, had called his bluff, and soon he would be be called upon to do the same. His throat clicked dryly and his eyes darted furtively beneath the visor, finally settling on Thor, or the faceless graven silver helm where his face should have been, realizing in that moment that Thor’s eyes were visible through the visor, that Thor’s eyes were locked to his face, full of brotherly warmth and fierce conviction.

“And you, Loki,” said Odin, a touch of metal in his voice, if Loki did not mistake him, and he doubted that he did. “What say you?”

Loki’s lips parted beneath his visor.

“I...I say yes.”

The words left his lips like birds, sparrows that had flown and could not be caught again.

“For the good of Asgard,” he managed, his voice growing stronger, as he warmed to this new nihilism. His voice dropped to a treacherous intonation. “May it be ever like this.”

Thor’s eyes did not falter, but they flickered slightly, bemused behind their heroic silver faceplate. The moment quickly passed; Thor was already reaching with his unbound hand for Loki’s veil. There was a faint hiss, like static, as the enchantment holding the visor released.

Loki realized that Thor was waiting for him, and he reached up to take hold of his visor in turn. When he lifted it away from Thor’s face, he saw that he was smiling faintly. As he should be, Loki thought. Things had gone well for the mighty Thor this day. Things had happened just as he had expected them to.

The thought made Loki’s expression settle into one of satisfaction as well.

Thor leaned over him, moving in to seal the compact with a kiss. Loki did not close his eyes as Thor’s lips descended upon his own, and so he knew that Thor shut his. But what he was thinking about at that moment, no one could guess or tell.

The kiss was dry, close-mouth, but not without passion. A bloodless, brotherly show of affection, which made Loki’s skin crawl and transformed his stomach into a ball of ice. His hand was still against Thor’s cheek, and he moved it around to the back of his neck, threading his long fingers into Thor’s golden mane. With a flick of his wrist, he pulled him closer, pressing their mouths firmly together. He slipped his tongue between Thor’s lax lips, snaking it around the inside of his mouth, relishing the cut of his teeth.

Thor’s eyes came open then, and they went wide in surprise. The hand around Loki’s wrist convulsed, biting into his arm hard enough to cut bruises. But still he did not pull back, and Loki was slow to release him.

“For the good of Asgard,” Odin said in a crisp, cold voice. “And before these seven witnesses of good rank and standing, I do sanctify this union.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note about titles, and the overlap thereof: Since we don't usually read in this fandom, we didn't think to check if another fic already existed with this name, or something similar. We realized too late that one did. We apologize for any confusion.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're sorry it's taken us so long to update this fic, but sometimes this annoying thing called adulthood intrudes on Greekhoop and I and impedes on our porn writing time. Let us make it up to you?

At the banquet which followed the ceremony, Loki said nothing and ate very little. He was seated at Thor’s right hand, a place of honor. When Odin had been King, it had always been the left that was reserved for him. 

Loki had taken notice of his new station, but he had not remarked upon it. He did not know what he was supposed to say, how he was supposed to react, now that the bond was established. He was Thor’s consort, and yet he felt no different than he had that morning, when he had been nothing but a dispossessed prince.

He had not expected anything to change fundamentally, but, in a moment of weak-mindedness, he had almost dared to hope that it might. Loki loathed that part of himself. He lived now for nothing but vengeance, he reminded himself, just as he had many times before. But this revenge would be different somehow. This time, it was not only his own bruised and sullied honor that he sought to defend.

This time, everything would be different.

“Are the festivities not to your liking, brother?” Thor said. He had drunk a good quantity of mead and mulled wine already, and when he jostled Loki with his elbow, it was hard enough to hurt.

Loki did not draw away from him. He straightened in his chair. Above the gleaming collar of his armor, his face was white and impassive, his expression utterly composed. “I see that no expense has been spared.”

“And why should it be?” Thor roared, suddenly standing up to his full height. “This is a glorious day for Asgard, and for me. The day that fate has brought my brother back to me.”

He raised his goblet in a toast, and a murmur of approval went up from all corners of the hall. To Loki, it seemed a senseless blur of glitter and noise. He had been too long in the dungeon to return to splendor such as this, and now he knew too much to ever appreciate it again. He clutched the arms of his burnished throne, and said nothing.

Frigga attempted to smile at him, but Loki could not return the gesture. He realized that the shock was settling in, now that the ceremony was over, and his triumphant moment of obscene rebellion had faded into the background, into nothing, almost like he hadn’t done it all.

She must have known, he realized abruptly. For all his birthright had obsessed him, he had always shied away from contemplating how the woman he had come to think of as his mother fit into the equation. He wondered if Odin had spared her the details of his conception. Perhaps she, too, had been fed the story about a foundling. It seemed an outlandish and ridiculous tale now that Loki knew the truth, but Frigga, devoted wife that she was, would have tried hard to make herself believe it.

Loki wanted to ask her, if for no other reason than to see if she might ever stoop to spare some feminine sympathy for the woman who had born him, but he knew that he never would.

Thor had drunk too much. He still carried himself well, but he had become loud and sentimental. Loki, who had nursed a single goblet of mulled wine for the last three courses, didn’t begrudge him the drinking, but he was a little embarrassed. He touched Thor’s arm, and he quieted at once.

“I want to go,” Loki said, loudly enough that Sif, who was seated beside him, cast a startled look at him.

“The festivities are in your honor, brother. You might at least attempt to enjoy them.”

“I want to go to bed,” Loki said again. “I’m tired.”

Thor looked at him curiously. Perhaps some golden dawn of suspicion was at last beginning to break over the frozen tundra of his blind trust. It didn’t matter; it was too late.

“I’ll take you,” he said, very quietly. He hardly seemed drunk at all anymore, a development which Loki found unsettling. But when Thor offered his arm, Loki took hold of it, hooking his hand around his brother’s powerful bicep, digging his fingers in hard enough to hurt.

A cheer went up from the assembled guests. Most of them still thought they were retiring to consummate the ceremony. Thor flushed uncharacteristically, but Loki had already drunk deeply of the cup of humiliation, and one more drop changed nothing. He stared straight ahead, his face immobile, looking at no one and meeting no eyes.

Thor led him out of the Great Hall amid whistles and gales of bawdy laughter. The chamber that had been set aside for the wedding night was prepared for them. Thor dismissed the servants, and then shut the door and bolted it. Once they were alone, he released his breath in a sigh and let his shoulders sag.

“The dream of a lifetime, is it not so, brother?” he said, and attempted a weary laugh.

Loki frowned, eyes narrowing.

He would have thought to find a very different Thor at the conclusion of such an event, a coup like this - triumphant, victorious, lusty- the Thor he had seen carousing after battle. This Thor had put on a raucous facade, and now, behind closed doors, seemed oddly distracted. Disenchanted? Perhaps he had overestimated Thor’s investment in possessing him.

Perhaps, after all, this was politics for Thor.

Loki felt his brow whiten with sudden tension, as he steeped in quiet outrage.

“Is it? You look as if you’ve rolled the sun across the sky and back forever and a day with no respite. I see no dream in your eyes.”

Thor gave a perfunctory laugh.

“I am tired. You drain me, brother, with your sullen looks, your lack of engagement. Yet I am pleased. Doubt not that. Perhaps in time this union will come to suit you. Perhaps in time you will be pleased as well.”

Loki stared at him, bemused.

Thor smiled wistfully, sitting down on the edge of the bed, forearms resting on his knees.

“And I am drunk. As should you be.”

“I am not,” said Loki, at once. He felt annoyed for a moment, excluded from Asgardian culture once again, unable to understand what came so easily to Thor, to the entire hall of spectators. “I had thought a man would not wish to be incapacitated by mead, when his wedding night beckons.”

Thor looked up, staring at Loki for a moment. His blue eyes were intent but hazed. 

“Come brother, let’s have no more of your sharp tongue tonight. Let me help you with your armor.”

“No,” Loki said. “Let me help you first.”

He sat on the edge of the bed beside him. Thor stiffened, as if he meant to pull away, but in the end he did not move. Loki felt a pang of uncertainty, of awkwardness, the same way he always did when he wasn’t sure what part he was supposed to be playing, what lie he was supposed to tell. 

Without looking at Thor’s face, he removed his golden gauntlets; despite their size and ornate appearance, they were very light. Loki arranged them on the armor rack, and when he returned he knelt, sweepingly, and began to work at the heavy clasps that held Thor’s greaves. The massive buckles and elaborate ties stung Loki’s fingertips while he worked.

Still, Thor had said nothing, had not even moved to make the task easier. Perhaps the meaning of the word “help” eluded the incomparable Thor. 

Or perhaps this was some kind of punishment. Thor wasn’t speaking to him until Loki drank himself into a stupor like a good Asgardian. Good luck with that, Loki thought. If it was silence Thor wanted, then silence he could have. It was far preferable to his brother’s sighing and sermonizing, as far as Loki was concerned. He kept his gaze fixed fast on the task at hand, pretending he had not even noticed. 

The last slipknot on Thor’s armor had shifted at some point during the ceremony and become impossible to untie. The more Loki pulled at it, the more frayed it became. His fingers had begun to feel cramped and raw, when he at last gave it a final frustrated yank. The tie broke, and the armor came free in Loki’s hands, sending him reeling back, off balance.

He caught himself on his elbow. To his shock, Thor had not moved even then. Neither to steady him when he fell, nor to help him up. Even before he was angry, or imperious, or self-righteous, Loki was hurt. Thor had always been there to catch him, and he could not imagine what he had done differently this time, what he had done that was so terrible in his brother’s eye.

“I’ll have you know--” he began, but when he looked up, he realized that Thor was not listening. His head was forward, his hair hanging lankly in his face. His eyes were closed.

He had fallen asleep.

Loki paused. He felt his anger dissipating, leaving behind only a strange hollow ache in the pit of his stomach. Quietly, he got up, and put the greaves away. When he returned, he took Thor by the shoulders and guided him to lie down. He did not wake while Loki moved him; he only made a few gruff, bull-like noises in his sleep.

The Mighty Thor would stir no more until morning, and then he would probably have a Midgard-sized headache.

Loki frowned, hesitant, feeling the call of conflict enter his mind.

Slowly, Loki reached for Thor’s shoulder, his fingertips grazing the invisible clasps of his chest plate, which released and fell away like magic. The other shoulder yielded to him with similar ease. Of course it was not magic, but ingenious science. It hardly mattered when what it revealed was nothing less a miracle.

His fingers did not tremble as he clasped the edges of the breastplate and drew it aside. It was awkward, but not immovable. Not like Thor. He let himself look for a moment at Thor’s unguarded chest, and then he averted his eyes, quickly, as if burned.

Loki carried the breastplate to the armor rack and set it in place. His breath was slightly elevated, and he told himself it was because of the exertion, but the armor was made by Asgard’s finest blacksmiths and alchemists, supremely strong and light in a relative sense.

He turned in place, gazing behind him at his immaculate brother sprawled on the bed, feeling his own chest rise and fall as his heartbeat increased.

Almost in a trance, he drew near the bed once more.

Loki’s throat felt tight. His lips parted as he reached out his fingers toward the shining scales that still clad Thor’s arms and held open a silver satchel. A few moments of intention, and the scales shifted, falling away, drawn into the bag as the enchanted mail disintegrated. Beneath Thor his cape was pinned, freed from his shoulders with the release of his breast plate.

Thor was now naked from the waist, his chest massive and intricately graven, his flesh dusky and luminous in the low light. Loki felt his lips part, eyes traveling downward, over the intricate knots and ripples that comprised the flat of his stomach, to the lowest visible part where a fine beige trail disappeared below the remainder of his wedding armor.

Thor’s face was angelic in his slumber, half-shrouded by whip-strikes of golden hair, his lashes longer than Loki had realized, cast against his cheekbone in feathery arcs of light brown.

There were so many sly and malicious things a trickster might do, with his brother-god insensate and vulnerable like this, that Loki’s mind reeled with the possibilities.

And yet his fingers shook, and all of them seemed colorless to him. He stood here without consequence, with Thor before him. His thoughts went beyond the mischievous, into the realm of iniquity.

He felt his own hand reaching out toward Thor’s loins, felt his eyes flickering, his lips tremulous.

“Release,” he whispered, an imperative.

The buckle of Thor’s belt unclasped, and the heavy gold scales slithered away from his hips to pool on the sheets. Loki scooped up the article, folding it neatly in his hands. He placed it on the rack, and then paused. With careful hands, he rearranged all the pieces of armor, not once looking behind him at his brother’s still bulk.

Not until everything was to his liking did he venture back to Thor’s bedside. He knew that if his brother had moved at all, he would have given up and gone away at once. But Thor slept the sleep of the just, unaware that his brother looked on him with such eyes as these.

Loki finished stripping him of his armor. First the silvery scales, and then the linen breechcloth that protected his loins. Thor was naked now, but he did not look vulnerable. Loki was sure that he had seen his brother’s unclothed body before - when they were children, and the nurse, to save time, had bathed them together - but much had changed between them since then. 

Much had changed about Thor, as well.

His heavy cock lay passively along the inside of his thigh, crowned by a halo of golden hair. Loki felt a strange emotion course through him, and he reached out with hesitant fingers to touch the heavy shaft.

His fingers closed around it. The weight of it was strange in his hands. He stroked it, just once, from base to tip, and he was surprised by how easily his fingers moved, as if Thor’s cock was, not slick, but made from some very smooth substance, marble or bronze.

Loki felt a tremor beneath his palm, and he jerked his hand away. His eyes moved guiltily to Thor’s face, but his brother slept on, oblivious.

Thor was shivering, he realized. His bronze skin prickled with gooseflesh. His brother was cold, a realization which Loki found strange, because, for the first time, he felt no chill at all.

Though it would have served his foolish brother right to catch his death, Loki elected to be merciful. He pulled the blankets up to Thor’s throat, and smoothed them with a delicate motion of his hand. Then, shedding his own armor as he went, letting it fall where it would, he staggered to the divan and collapsed.

He was asleep almost at once.


End file.
